31 December 2012

Welcome to the new website, just in time for 1st January. The diary entries will be appearing each day on the front page from 11pm (London time) on 1st January 2013, starting with 1st January 1660. The RSS feed and daily emails should also start working again.

However, the regulars among you will soon notice there are many things currently missing from the site. When thinking about starting running the diary again, I realised I couldn’t face wrestling with the old site for several more years: it had outgrown its original software and it was difficult to add new features.

So I decided to rewrite the website. I’ve had a busy Christmas and New Year “holiday” and have got it this far — nearly everything is readable and usable — but there’s still plenty to do. Here are the main things missing that will return:

• DONE: Posting annotations/comments. This will return soon (within a week or two) but unfortunately I couldn’t get it ready in time for 1st January. Hold on to your thoughts!
• Search. This may take a bit longer to get working again.
• DONE: Recent Activity Page. This will return when annotations can be posted again.
• DONE: Maps. For now, Encyclopedia Topics about places have a link to their location on Google Maps.
• Wikipedia content. Encyclopedia Topics that exist on Wikipedia link to those pages for now, rather than have the text on this site.
• DONE: Graphs of references. All the references between Encyclopedia Topics and Diary Entries are shown, but there’s currently no graphs of them.
• DONE: Various text pages. Some pages, like the text of the 1893 introduction, and more “About” pages haven’t been put back yet.
• DONE: Pop-up hover text on links. Those little panels that appeared over links in Diary Entries aren’t there yet, but they should return shortly.
• DONE: Family Tree. This should be back very soon.
• DONE: Story So Far. These pages do exist but are currently missing their introductory page and a link to them.
• DONE: On this day links. Like the links to parliamentary proceedings.

There are also various little tweaks and fixes that need doing. And the design of the new site is currently quite bare and characterless, so I can hopefully improve that a little too.

Most URLs have changed but most old links should redirect to the new pages, and I’ve hopefully fixed all the links in existing Diary Entries, Annotations, Encyclopedia Topics, etc.

So, plenty still to do, but the basics are all ready to go. This should provide us with a better experience over coming years. Ready to go?